love

[maderpaker]

I stumbled upon Amy tan's the bonesetter's daughter and this shit about love was really beautiful. Anyone would have though this is about school lessons but really, it was speaking about love.
The four manifestations of beauty

With any form of beauty, there are 4 levels of ability. This is true of painting, calligraphy, literature, music, and dance.

The first level is competent. It conveys a sense of strength and longevity. It is the ability to draw the same thing over and over in the same strokes, with the same force, the same rhythm, the same trueness. This kind of beauty, however, is ordinary.

The second level is Magnificent. This one goes beyond skill. Its beauty is unique and yet it is simpler, with less emphasis on the stalk and more on the leaves. It conveys both strength and solitude. The lesser painter would be able to capture one quality but not the other.

The third level is divine. The leaves now are now shadows blown by an invisible wind, and the stalk is there mostly by suggestion of what is missing. And yet the shadows are more alive than the original leaves that obscured the light. A person seeing this would be wordless to describe how this is done. Try as he might, the same painter could never capture the feeling of this painting, only the shadow of the shadow.

The fourth level is greater than this, and it is within each mortal’s nature to find it. We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure. It is what innocent children have it is what old masters regain once they have lost their minds and become children again.

This level is called Effortless. The beauty of effortlessness in all things.

For we both knew we were speaking about the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to, as if we were two stalks of bamboo bent toward each other by the chance of the wind. And then we bent toward each other and kissed, lost in the nowhere of being together.